It’s almost not respectable any more to love your own place. Ideas like nationalism and patriotism have fallen into disrepute being nowadays associated with jingoism and the most radical, virulent elements of the right. To say you love your own place implies that you think it’s better than other places, that you’d like to make the whole world in its image, that you’re unutterably stuffy and provincial. Quite apart from anything else, in a global age the micro is passé.

Sometimes though, unexpectedly, a great wave of patriotism passes over me. I realise that inside myself (as opposed to anywhere else) there is a place called Ireland. This sense of an Ireland of the spirit is all bound up with a jumble of images and memories like the first time I saw the sea at Salthill when I was about 7 years old: the surprise of it, its expanse at the end of a wind of unremarkable suburban streets. I remember too the famine drills still rippling the end field of the farm where I grew up or in Dublin, at dusk, the daring thrill of walking across first floor ceiling joists in a new housing estate and seeing through the gaping blocks the rows of identical houses spring up beyond. I recall the news of new atrocities from Derry or Belfast, a backdrop to the serving of 70s stews and Instant Whip, and my parents talking about it in that veiled language that grown ups use when they want to prevent children being frightened or absorbing ancient biases.

The men in mohair suits, the death of Dev, Richie Ryan, Liam Cosgrave, Charlie Haughey all troop past in the march of my childhood. They’re mixed in with the discovery of history: the day the desiccated old pipe-smoking school master said “This is a subject called History. We haven’t done it before”, and began with the Stone Age. Later, there was the school trip to Kilmainham Jail and the actual pain in my 10-year-old heart about the 1916 executions – the thoughts of James Connolly being tied to a chair to face his firing squad.  In the 80s, when I was a student and discovering all the reasons to hate nationalism and Irish politics, I was chased out the door to vote (for anyone) because, as my mother put it, “Your own people suffered to win you this right, you ungrateful rip! And women threw themselves under horses too!”

In the time when I grew up there was no possibility of foreign holidays but there was the whole of Ireland. My parents, in an act of militant carvanning, made sure we saw the sights of our own place – Kerry, Cork, Clare, Galway, Sligo, Mayo, Donegal and Wicklow – every summer a new place for playing Black Jack for matchsticks. It was a good thing: Yeats and Sligo and Lissadell; Daniel O’Connell and Kerry and Ryan’s Daughter; Lough Dan and Parnell and Avondale – you get the picture. Everything joined up: who we are and who we were, how the places entered art and history.

When I finally stopped being unemployed (another recession, another time), I got the shtart at RTE and was lucky to spend some years working on various programmes on Radio 1. Getting out on the road, as it was known, was more easily accomplished in radio (try bringing a whole TV studio set anywhere) and my childhood working knowledge of the country came in handy when driving far and wide with a bagful of notebooks and a knot in my stomach about finding enough interviewees by 7am the following morning. People were always wonderful and never seemed unduly perturbed by a whey-faced researcher turning up on their doorsteps at 10pm insultingly wondering if they were interesting. I mention this by way of illustrating how journeying through the country for work made me love it even more – eating doorstop sandwiches at Gort Mart, walking along the quays at the crack of dawn to the RTE Cork studios, a comedy dousing by ferocious waves on the ferry to Inishbofin, learning for the first time what battering was at a sean nós céilí at The Armada on Spainish Point.

All of this, all of this and more, came back to me last night when I saw the ISS photograph of Ireland by night – a sudden rush of love for our little patch of twinkling dark on the vast dark hemisphere. I saw the huge flare of Dublin there and the bright points of light of all the rural towns. Somewhere down there, beyond the last village lamp-post is the little place where I grew up. It’s the place I go back to in all my daydreaming, the place that began to teach me who we are and were.  As we tremble on the brink of bust I looked at Ireland and felt sorry for her but there’s no sense in that. Who I really feel sorry for is us.

Photograph of Ireland at Night posted via Twitpic here by @Astro_Wheels (Douglas.H.Wheelock) from the International Space Station. Help for the photographically inept (me) from @anniewestdotcom

When I was a child, I loved Hallowe’en. The house where I grew up was opposite a cemetery complete with a large set of celestial gates which creaked and slammed with an ominous clang. From my nightime window I could see dark upon dark: black swaying sitka trees in shadowy relief against an inky sky. Thrown into relief too were the audible punctuations in the stilly night, the call of a vixen, a donkey braying, our own cat going a mating. In that long ago country night, it wasn’t hard for me to believe in the existence of the supernatural, to think that out there in the darkness was a mysterious mirror world, close but untouchable.

At Hallowe’en that parallel world grew closer. The turf was stacked, the hay was saved, the nights drew in and the kitchen window resumed its propensity to weep streams of condensation all day long. Our neighbour’s son dragged out the story of the banshee at the old bog tree and terrified me and his sisters anew with visions of this streely harridan combing her knotted tresses while squatting birdlike on a decaying tree stump. She terrified me. I was happy about having no O or Mc in my surname until I thought about my father’s surname in Irish, O’Nuallain, and realised with dread that the banshee could, by her own demented rules, easily come to squat on our roof to foretell a death. It was she who made me kneel between my mother and father’s seats in the car whenever we drove anywhere on a wintry night. The back seat of our old Austin 1100 seemed a place where the dark could easily snatch a child away.

It’s said that Catholicism still had a stranglehold on Ireland back then (the 60s and 70s) but where I grew up the ancient rites of the pagan world were still powerfully present at Hallowe’en, St Stephen’s Day, and again in May when we had a May tree/May pole. The Church holy day of All Saints (November 1st) was a time to think about deceased family members and to pray for their eternal rest but it was also a time when the spirit world drew close pulled by the magnetism of our warm fires and vigorous aliveness. Ducking your face into a basin of water to grab an apple with your teeth was a game and a test of skill but you could also perhaps spy a ghostly face, not your own, in the ripply water. The face could be a foretelling of a future lover or a visitor from the spirit world. Equally so with mirrors or any sort of walking about in or around midnight on October 31st. I could never decide which was the scarier prospect, meeting a ghost or seeing some embodiment of a future lover because this would not be a boy like the ones at school but some fullgrown man that you were destined to meet and love.

More than anything else though Hallowe’en lived in my imagination fanned to life by stories and darkness and superstition. Every year my father bought my brother and I sweaty plastic masks – devils or monsters or leering witches – beyond that there was no buying of dressing up materials. You wore your mask and wrapped yourself up in a blanket or a sheet or one of your mother’s old maternity smocks. We traipsed to maybe four neighbouring houses so disguised, giddy with a mixture of fear and greed, and were given sweets, nuts and apples to add to those already at home. We never said “Trick or treat”, it wasn’t in our vocabulary but later, when we moved to Dublin the plaintive cry during ‘going round the houses’ was “Help the Hallowe’en party”. It wasn’t till we moved to Dublin either that  I saw sparklers or fireworks or bonfires or heard bangers or smelled stink bombs.

For my own children, Hallowe’en means greed but very little in the line of delicious scares. If they had their way, every year would involve a different costume bought off-the-peg at M&S, a different expensive latex mask, a new high of struggling to keep up with the Joneses. They’d like to disport themselves as tarty witches, half-Cheryl, half-Lolita because that’s the look on the streets these last 5 Hallowe’ens or so. They’d like to live in the house that lined its drive with pumpkin lanterns and had its garden smothered in spray-on spider web. They’d love me to be the kind of mother who dispensed full sized Mars bars and pricey Juicy Drop Pops or plastic gee-gaws into the copious (specially purchased) sacks of the hopeful Trick or Treaters who pass by here.

Last time I thought about it I figured that a full-on Hallowe’en – house and garden trimmings, full regalia for dressing up, the stash of sweets and other gunk, the drinks for nearby neighbours and friends who traipse around after their children – must, really must, cost the bones of a grand or more. Now that’s a crime of extravagance in either good times or bad. So much money spent aping the Hallowe’en of Elm Street or some other asinine Wisteria Lane, so many miles away from an authentic Irish celebration. Never having had the kind of disposable income that could provide this kind of largesse Hallowe’en has always been a simpler affair in my house. This year though, I’m going to try to rehabilitate story-telling as the central part of what makes Hallowe’en special. I’d like to gift my daughters the delicious fears, the scary imaginings: direct contact not so much with the spirit world but with the ancestral experience of Hallowe’en. To think about spirits and ghosts, magic and divination is to exercise the imagination and it is as important as any other form of exercise. To imagine the otherly is to encounter the otherly inside oneself: the pagan heart of human creativity.

Following a walk on the beach at Dollymount today my children returned home full of stories about black waves, a foul smell and piles of black gunk on the sand. It was, allegedly, “eew”! We went back this evening and took some photos. It certainly looks extraordinary. The sludge piles are seemingly the result of dredging work carried out by Dublin City Council to deal with the rise of ectocarpus an algal bloom which is presently to be found right across Dublin bay. This Irish Times article by Olivia Kelly from May 22nd details the causes of the algae which flourishes in warm weather but also, interestingly, when the “nutrient content” of the water is high. The arrival of the algae coincides with Dollymount losing its Blue Flag status as referred to in this Irish Independent article by Fergus Black from June 6th.

Photographs by Stephen

When I stopped to think about it, I realised that although I was familiar with the phrase ‘lifelong learning’, I didn’t know what it meant in an organised or official sense. I did a swift search on the topic and see that it refers to adult education and night classes – that’s what it means in an official sense. It is to this educational sector that the term belongs.  It’s like saying that ‘dissociation’ belongs to psychiatry and ‘nausea’ belongs to medicine or ‘Au’ belongs to the periodic table of the elements and chemistry.

This is all a very long way of saying that I have my own private, subjective understandings of all the above, and sometimes these internal meanings bear only a passing relation to the mainstream understanding of the terms. ‘Au’ will reliably get me thinking about Latin, ‘dissociation’ instantly triggers ideas about boredom and ‘nausea’ relates more quickly to abhorrence than it does to any dim recollection of morning sickness or three days puking in Cairo.

My understanding of lifelong learning is rather straightforward though. I saw a TV documentary during the week about the buyout of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America during which one of the contributors stated that no corporation can stand still, that if such an organisation isn’t growing, it’s stagnating. It seems to me that the idea of lifelong learning, the real heart of it, is about growing and not stagnating. It’s a lot less toxic too than what Bank of America bought into with the acquisition of the elite Wall Street brokerage firm.

I’ve referred to it here on the blog before but one of the losses unemployment makes me feel most acutely is the loss of access to learning. When you’re in the midst of your everyday job you mightn’t notice that you’re learning, but you are. A colleague’s recommendation of a film or a book or a play, someone else’s recounting of a good night out, even a bracing exchange of political views springing from last night’s TV – all learning. That’s quite apart from the challenges that work itself presents and I suppose that’s why the workers of Mediastan do it for often lousy wages and short term contracts: it’s the endless, captivating variety.

So thinking such thoughts, on Saturday I gladly closed the door behind me and headed off to the Dublin Writers Festival. One woman, one day, six hours of writers and books and other adults – bliss! I don’t believe in hero worship, never have, I see my own flaws and know that they’re replicated throughout our species, so while I believe heroes exist, I don’t believe in the worship of same. Still, when Prof. Declan Kiberd takes his seat on the podium alongside Sarah Bakewell and Ruth Padel ahead of the talk entitled ‘How to Live’, I find myself drifting back through the years to Theatre M, UCD and undergraduate English. As with Proust’s madeleine there’s one significant thing that triggers this memory rush: Kiberd takes off his watch and places it on the table in front of him as I’d seen him do at the university lectern many times when I was only a girl and, with his heroic guidance, discovering ‘Ulysses’ for the first time. All at once I am in learning mode again, all eyes, all ears, delighted to drift like thistledown on the updraft of new ideas.

The theme of the talk works sweetly: all three writers have recently produced work that looks at how writing from other centuries has relevance in contemporary times. Bakewell’s book is about Montaigne, the original blogger, whose entire oeuvre was a sixteenth century instructional on how to live written from his intensely personal perspective. “The ordinary is the proper domain of the artist. The extraordinary can safely be left to journalists and poets” says Kiberd quoting Joyce before going on to argue persuasively that Ulysses offers a manual for living a more complete and humane life. Ruth Padel, poet, conservationist and novelist, is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin and through the prism of her reading of Darwin’s letters and work, one sees that Darwin’s true virtuosity was in reading and interpreting the world – he wasn’t a scientist by training, he was a seer, a thinker, an understander. Padel reads from her novel Where the Serpent Lives about a confrontation between one of her characters Richard and a female king cobra “Looking down at his feet like a boy confessing to a broken rule, Richard stood immobile for what seemed like a very long time. He concentrated, as only a scientist or poet can, on precise names for the leaves he was looking at. He felt her eyes upon him. He was in the hands of the living god, of neurosynapses in a reptile brain”.

By the end of this talk my eyes had brimmed and cleared and brimmed again such was my joy and relief at being in the presence of ideas once more.  I went home with a bagful of books bought with money I can’t afford but vital if I’m to survive this recession with my head intact. This is what I understand by lifelong learning – some of life’s greatest consolations and liberations can be accessed through reading.

Back when I was one of Declan Kiberd’s students, my dad used to drive me demented with his regular commentaries on all he had learned at “the university of life”. These sermons caused me to sigh and roll my eyes – how could admonitions like “never leave down a scissors in long grass” or “Christmas presents are mutual bribery” possibly be as useful as finding out the meaning of ‘ineluctable’ or feeling the fear and reading Finnegan’s Wake anyway? After I graduated and was splendidly unemployed my father used to shake his head in a cod- rueful manner and tell me that my glorious education was now complete.  Of course, I didn’t get what he meant then, I didn’t understand that reading about how to live can only be truly assimilated by living, that, as Declan Kiberd said, “You may forget what you read but the bits of reading that remain are ratified by your experience”.

I hope I have years of learning ahead of me. I don’t ever want to drift into that formless state called retirement, I don’t want to go on cruises, I want my eyesight to the end and interesting people to talk with and wonderful books.  In my humble way I want to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.

[More about Sarah Bakewell's work here. More about the Dublin Writers Festival here]

[I also watched the excellent film Up in the Air in recent weeks. In it, George Clooney plays the role of  Ryan Bingham, a corporate downsizer who uses the carrot of lifelong learning ahead of the stick of involuntary redundancy.]

In the week gone by I had dealings with my own frailties. “Not again!” sez you.  But, I’m afraid, it is so and it is true.

People like me who have a sometime career in TV must do the thing which is called pitching.  It is as cruel a thing as the Broadway cattle call or the modelling go-see or the open audition.  Facing the dread odds of (a) other people’s/the competition’s talents, (b) the lottery of what might or might not work and (c) the available small pool of TV production monies one must gather one’s persuasive abilities and sell/pitch your idea to someone who’s in a decision-making position – a TV commissioning editor or a film funder.

Now I do know that there are far, far worse things in life than pitching and being turned down. It’s not nearly as disheartening as thinking about the last decade in Ireland or indeed, the world. But the thing about that one little idea that eventually slinks its way onto your TV screens is that its been through a lot of lives before it makes its way to you.

It starts with someone like me sitting at home, my desk lit by the chilly iridescence of a blank Word document, racking my brain for what’s called “a brilliant idea”. Of course, this kind of hopefulness hardly ever pays off. No one ever opens a clean page, has a light-bulb moment and trots out a perfect one-page pitch. By the time I get to the chilly page, I’ve already spent weeks in a combination of fruitful, labour-intensive research and largely fruitless but comforting displacement activity. So work mixed with a long Facebook discussion on the worst love songs ever or work mixed with a whole two hours spent in front of Come Dine with Me or America’s Next Top Model. Then there’s work mixed with long walks or work followed by staring in a preoccupied manner at the new releases in Tower Records. The bastard thing about it all though is that even when you’re having the craic on Facebook or wondering if you should buy the new Villagers album, you’re hauling around the horrible boulder of the wannabe idea.

This is why, when you’re sitting at the computer about to commit to print the fruit of weeks of thought, the boulder has become an immense edifice – it’s now like a giant new strain of flu that is, you hope, impregnable to attack from any kind of anti-viral (aka the commissioner’s fault-finding jab). The idea needs to be not only as original as possible (within the largely commercial parameters of TV), it needs to be the right time to have such an idea and it needs to be defensible to any imagined interrogation of its core concept. To get it right you need to have done the work, thunk the thoughts, written it down in a clear, attractive and attention-grabbing manner, and have all your stars aligned in their most propitious astral arrangement.

By now I hope you will see why I compare pitching to auditioning: luck and timing may have as much to do with your likely success as all the time you’ve spent researching and crafting the top two paragraphs of the pitch. I’ve spent a lot of my working life pitching but I’ve never regarded it as a science. I’m resistant to the notion that I must sell an idea like as if I was a door-to-door mop salesman or a car dealer or any other kind of person who talks about ‘closing’. It’s not a matter of feeling snooty about these kinds of sales techniques but thinking of pitching as a mechanical thing just makes me feel queasy. It reminds me of an early newspaper job I had selling advertising space to the building industry – its joylessness, its sole kick in the sale.

For good or ill then, I’m the other kind of idiot. Through dint of thought and effort, by the time I get to the commissioner’s desk I’m in the grip of temporary insanity – I really do believe I have a brilliant idea and that this idea should hit our TV screens with singular urgency.  In fact, the vision thing is all I really have to sell: the idea has infected me and I hope to pass on the infection.

Preparing for the pitch

Generally, in the world of TV pitching, you don’t know what the opposition is up to. Oh, you hear things  – you might know that another company is working on something for the same time slot or that X is still hawking their fashion series but you don’t actually know the detail. Last week though I experienced a new and select kind of torture. This time, I pitched to three people in front of 20 observers, 8 of whom would also pitch. What I had done in the past, behind closed doors facing either one commissioner or a panel, I now had to do as a sort of self-presentational public performance.

A lifetime ago I decided that my TV career belonged behind the camera. There were very good reasons for this decision not least of which was an inherent dislike of addressing crowds or worse,  remembering a whole spiel that must be delivered more-or-less verbatim. Off-the-cuff talking to groups, I’ve done, but this ‘you’ve got 5 minutes, now talk’ malarkey, well I’m just not cut out for it. All the monsters from my early school experiences of misremembering or disremembering or freezing rear up in the steam from the numerous cups of coffee I need to inch me toward this armageddon.

In the end, defying a very strong urge to cut and run, I get through it. I feel the whoosh of adrenalin, like the human equivalent of that surge you feel from a jet’s engines before it blasts down the runway for take-off. The surge is almost uncontrollable and the inner voice is going ‘Oh, oh, oh fuck’ but I get the idea out there coherently accompanied by a good dollop of  my own passion for the subject matter. I am neither the best or the worst performer on the day and the relief when I’m finished is such that I’m just glad to be alive and not to have had a fit of some kind. And no, no one thought my proposal was a work of staggering genius, nor were they gagging to get me to sign on any kind of dotted line. The reality of pitching just doesn’t live up to the legend that ends with “and they signed me up there and then”.

My experience with successful pitches is that the pitch is only the first step in a conversation that may or may not end in a documentary or series on TV. Still left to prove is whether the pitch can be developed through several stages including further testing of its thesis and its costs – this process alone can change the idea fundamentally: it is now a combination of your work and the broadcaster’s input. Later, there may be a need for an almost complete script or a fully fleshed-out treatment which is an intensely demanding exercise in imaginative forecasting. If the whole project is based around a presenter, particularly a new one, the broadcaster may not feel the presenter is right and the entire project founders at this juncture (months down the line from the seemingly successful pitch).

So, to get through a long career in TV you need a thick hide or should I say, you need to be able to lie to yourself and others that you possess this kind of toughness. It’s a discombobulating process divorcing yourself from a beloved idea you imagined could truly fly but it has to be done, because on the morning after optimism you have to open another blank Word document and begin again.

In the midst of the whole recession discussion about how we lost the run of ourselves, I notice more and more people coming forward with assertions that, while some people may have lost their heads, they certainly didn’t.  The thing is, people who didn’t lose the run of themselves have had to put up with a lot of guff being talked (then and now) and after years of put up and shut up, they’re beginning to find their voices.

For instance, it’s been said ad nauseam that the scandal arising from the issue of ministerial pensions for serving TDs, or those ex-ministers otherwise employed, is an act of vengeance by the Meejastanis and the voters working hand-in-hand. But last I heard, some three years back now, there are a lot of people on this little island who can’t afford pensions. They can’t afford contributions to one little itty bitty pension never mind handily acquiring two or three gratis. The people who’ve long thought that ministerial cars and ministerial overnight expenses and State postage financing private vote-trawling was an affront and a misuse of power, still think so. “Wha, wha”, I hear a FF’er wail “Sure if we don’t get some campaign funding from the public purse, we’ll only have to let ourselves be corrupted by big business again”. But FF’ers or FG’ers please believe me when I say I don’t want your leaflets or your letters or your election posters at all. Also, I don’t want to pay for them!

For years and years, the putter-uppers have listened to the same auld dishonest harangue – no one will go into politics for ordinary wages, higher civil servants will not be bright and best unless they get stonking terms and rewards, top bankers need incentivisation through bonuses or else they’ll be off. You see very important people work harder than you and I, right? They never have a minute’s peace, day or night. It’s all just work, work, work! That’s why they need big rewards for doing the State (or the bank) some service.

Tell that to the couple who commute from Offaly to Dublin for work every day, only seeing their children morning and night, to try to keep up payments on their negative equity semi-d. Tell that to the three-job immigrant who goes from a cleaning job to a petrol station job to a fast food job daily. Tell it to any working mother whose working day starts at 6am and stretches up until 10-11pm. None of these people get any respect from either bankers or government but they are required to keep putting up.

The other reason for the handsome wages, incentivisation packages, and pensions hoovered up by the powerful for themselves is the notion of power as an onerous burden. You know the territory : powerful men in important positions making crucial decisions. But I don’t see any sign that these important men understand their positions as anything more onerous, or indeed more modern, than droit de seigneur. In fact the sense of entitlement seemingly felt by the powerful is vaguely amusing; that they live and breathe seems almost enough.

But living and breathing is not enough in the hardscrabble lives of low-earners or the unemployed.  They are the modern-day economic equivalent of gun fodder. They and their children are irrelevant, voiceless, powerless, and must suck it up for NAMA as rich men (quite legally) squirrel away their wealth under their spouses’ names. Who could not be angry about this?

In 2004 I worked on devising and producing a TV series presented by the economist David McWillams. The earliest team meetings discussed, among other things, the fakery of the boom, the crazy property prices, the massive bank bonuses, the eggs-in-one-basket. That this was apparent in 2004 to us ordinary folk on a programme production team makes Brian Cowen’s speech of last night sound like  convenient hindsight at best or outright fabrication at worst.

So no, I don’t agree with those who say that there’s too much impotent anger around, or that the blame game is a fruitless and negative pursuit. Quite the reverse is true, those who’ve been biting their lips over the insiderism of Irish public life no longer have to have their voices drowned out or undermined by an erroneous consensus built on a baseless boom. Yes, we desperately need to make positive moves to address the crisis of economy and belief and faith but we also need the white hot heat of anger to cauterise the weeping sore of inequity, untruthfulness and prevarication.  How otherwise does saying ‘never again’ make any sense?

There’s a school project underway in my house. This time it’s one where my daughter has to compare her own childhood with those of her parents. So I’m being inundated with questions about what games I played, what toys I had, what pastimes I enjoyed. If you’ve read this blog before you’ll know that I remember some things very clearly – particularly moments in my life or years in my life shot through with emotion but still, I find it hard to understand what kind of a person I am or was, or what it all means in the space-time continuum of now looking back at then.

I can’t even begin to understand who a perfectly balanced person is, I can’t imagine that anyone is ever turned away at a psychoanalyst’s office but one of my own ‘issues’ seems to be that I recall passionately what I experienced passionately. This became clear to me when, in the course of school project research, I rummaged through a box of my old school copies from when I was between ten and thirteen years of age. Odd that they still exist but I come from a long and distinguished line of hoarders and sometimes that’s useful. My copies were covered lovingly by my mother in old Christmas wrapping paper or old wallpaper and between these covers I find myself preserved in amber; frozen moments of myself that are more telling than any faded 70s Instamatic shot. I really can’t understand where I got my idea of myself from but from a very early age I supposed myself good at English and good at art. Nothing could have changed my mind about this but, although I did strange things like read the whole of any year’s English reader within days of getting it, there is very little outward show of this inner zeal. Looking at my old copies now with their horrendous spelling, stinky grammar, unfinished sentences, pen-hand-exhaustion leading to hieroglyphics, doodles, and pages where the rubber wore holes, I really, really wonder what I was thinking. Understandably, I wasn’t getting much encouragement from teachers either: the copies are testament to all the many and varied kind of red marks teachers use to indicate shock and dismay.

Punctuation exercise from 1970s school-book

It’s ironic then all the homework times I’ve held forth in my own kitchen, to my own children, on the topics of spelling, grammar and drawing neat lines. On one occasion I even went so far as to put up a wall chart with sentences indicating the difference between ‘their’, ‘they’re’ and ‘there’ and ‘hour’, ‘our’ and ‘or’. I suppose it’s some kind of impulse toward generational progression – I don’t want my children’s school experience to be like mine. I don’t want any of them put sitting beside the smart girl to ‘bring them on’, I don’t want them labelled as less-than in a system that only rewards swotiness and rote-learning. I want my children to have enough knowledge to fly below the radar until they are ready to truly understand those Dr Seuss lines “You have brains in your head. / You have feet in your shoes. / You can steer yourself / any direction you choose.”

The thing about any system, educational or otherwise, is that it’s designed to be one-size-fits-all. You can get very bad ideas about yourself from a system. For instance, as a child I believed that being good at English and art must be easy, that only a state of generalised stupidity could make you love these subjects. What I would have given to be good at long division or to spit out paragraphs of Irish prose learned by heart or to play Für Elise on the violin. Instead, every school day started with a sweaty apprehension about last night’s homework. Oh the damp grey days spent in steamy classrooms waiting to stand and recite tables or Irish spellings! Even now, my stomach clenches at how keenly I felt my stumbling humiliation in front of forty-four other children. There were just no bouquets for being able to draw an excellent castle or Elizabeth I with detailed ruff and being able to write “The sky was enveloped with scarlet scars, a pale white half moon was showing itself” was no match for cracking compound interest or even sewing a neat apron.

Parse and analyse

You might think I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about some of my own experiences in the educational system. You might think how sad it is to still have an irresistible urge to validate myself all these years later. Maybe there’s something in what you’re thinking but I’d much prefer if you (and I) stopped and thought about how we perceive our own children’s efforts in the world of school. Here’s what I’d like you to understand. I’d like you to know that if your child is drawn to narrative subjects, if they’re good at art or transmitting their thoughts to paper in an interesting way, if they dislike maths or stumble with science, they will get very little praise or recognition within any mainstream educational system. If they are part of this disenfranchised tribe, if they are on the road less travelled, they will, for many years of their young lives, rely on you for validation of all their creative efforts. It’s in your power to praise the good idea in the poorly written sentence or to see that a doodle, while looking messy, shows thought, shows talent. It is such a pity, in our modern times, that  educational systems still have not found a way to embrace all the children; that some children get positive cues about themselves while others feel themselves to be ‘no good at school’. So, buy the child the book or take the child to films or art exhibitions or concerts or the theatre  – let her or him see that there’s more to life than full marks in spelling or being top of the class.

I’d like my child’s childhood to be infected with the joy of reading, as mine was. Books told me, in the end, that it was alright to be me. How I’d like my daughter’s childhood to differ from mine is that I’d like her to know earlier and more clearly that her destiny is a very lovely one, one that can be filled with real joy of discovery, true pleasure in thought, wonderful flights of imagination and the chance to passionately engage with a myriad of life-enhancing ideas. I want to her  to realise that being outside the mainstream, that being part of our tribe is not a curse but a blessing, one as rich and beautiful as being good at sums and science. In the end it doesn’t matter what I tell her about the games I played or the toys I had, I can tell her what a school system can’t: that in this busy, competitive world there is a real and worthwhile place for her (and all her sums-hating siblings).

[I thought about the lyrics of this Harry Chapin song while writing this post]

[And I thought about this Robert Frost poem]

Last November I bought a proper mixing bowl for making my Christmas cake and puddings. It wasn’t that I didn’t have other mixing bowls, all plastic and in three different sizes, but because I saw a bowl like the one my grandmother used to make cakes and brown bread and apple tarts. A proper glazed mixing bowl; on the outside a comforting biscuit-colour with a relief pattern of lozenges, on the inside, white and luminous. It has a rightness about it, this earthenware bowl, and it does proper homage to the art of cake-making; a satisfying sandy scrape in the mixing of butter and sugar and a resonant thunk when the wooden spoon hits its sides.

My maternal grandmother died when I was a toddler, I have no memory of her but I know she held me when I was a baby: that she knew me even if I didn’t know her. Yet, for all that I didn’t know her, her life and her story have always been important to me. This is mostly because of information my mother has passed on to me: seemingly I look like her and my love of clothes and jewellery is a sort of genetic weakness passed on from this granny who returned to Ireland from America in 1923 with a steamer trunk full of style.

Wanamaker's Grand Court

I also credit to this grandmother whatever grit I have in my soul. She struck out for America in 1915 from a townland in Mayo and whenever I see archive photos of Ellis Island or a film treatment of the immigrant experience, I think of her confronting the then already modern metropolis of New York: a dark-haired country girl from the wet, tussocky fields of Mayo with $50 in savings and the trade of servant. When I first saw the New York skyline, when I visited Ellis Island, when I walked through Grand Central or took the elevator to the top of the Empire State, I thought of her: I walked her steps. Later, she found work as cook to a prosperous family in Philadelphia and developed a passion for visiting Wanamaker’s, a veritable temple of retail spread over 12 floors and one of the world’s first department stores. I wonder what it must have been like to go from shopping at a mixed draper in Castlebar to a department store with an Egyptian Hall, a Crystal tea room that seated 1000, and a huge pipe organ in its Grand Court atrium.

She met my grandfather, a Westmeath man working as a foreman for a timber merchant, and they married in Philadelphia in 1920. In 1923 they returned to Ireland, already parents to one daughter, and with a cargo of American furnishings. Shortly after their return their house burned to the ground and their American savings were sapped in rebuilding. All that survived of their American odyssey was the Victrola (a cabinet gramophone), my grandfather’s collection of light opera and lieder on celluloid disc and the beautiful ivory silk and tulle wedding dress with its steamer trunk companions.

The cabinet gramophone known as a Victrola

My grandparents reared 8 children and my grandmother’s jewellery, her skirts and blouses with mother-of-pearl buttons all disappeared in decades of children playing dress-up. There wasn’t anywhere much to wear finery in Westmeath in the 1930s or 40s either nor was there time in the gruelling round of farming and clothes-washing and cooking and mending. My mother often thinks that had her parents not met in Philadelphia, my grandmother may never have returned to Ireland and to the slavish grind she must have anticipated. My grandmother hardly ever spoke of the years she spent in Philadelphia but American ways were there in her cooking – a certain kind of gravy, a certain kind of pie-crust, an easy confidence and competence in cooking for 10 people daily.

That wedding dress in 1920

My grandmother's dress now

Tulle and silk as fragile as paper

It’s poignant now to see my grandmother’s wedding dress and to look at her wedding photograph – that hopeful girl dressed in her American finery. In her eyes I see confidence and strength, a frank gaze that’s unafraid. My mother keeps the wedding dress, stained with age, its fabric delicate as paper, in a cardboard box. It’s a time capsule of my granny. I can take it out and hold it to my own shoulders and see that she must have been around the same height as me. I can try to feel what it was like to be her meticulous self. Oddly though, it was in November past that I felt most connected with her life. I followed an old recipe for Christmas pudding, one that included beef suet and barley wine. As I mixed the ingredients in the earthenware bowl, the kitchen full of winter heat and the smell of spices and alcohol, I felt myself to be her inheritor – I stirred, as my mother stirred, as her mother stirred.  I stirred then through tears.

The idea for the above post was provided by my friend Sorcha Kenny. She is working on a dramatic piece for the upcoming Project Arts Theatre showcase in Dublin this Thursday- Saturday (April 29th-May 1st 2010). Entitled My Life in Dresses and inspired in part by her own interest in vintage clothes, the piece will explore the stories behind well-loved dresses and their former and present owners. If you have a dress with a story, Sorcha’s full-length play won’t be staged until September next, so there’s still time to email her via her website.

These past weeks I’ve been feeling jittery. I’ve been feeling jittery and apprehensive and that’s just when I’m not feeling outraged and annoyed. It’s not a good way to live; a chicken licken has come to roost outside my window, it’s cheeping day and night and it won’t go away. It’s tiring and wearing to have a constant yawning worry about the future.

Now, I despise in myself ‘the end is nigh’ mind-set, its sour lack of any shred of hope is surely not rational yet it’s excruciatingly difficult to be optimistic in Ireland these days. It’s not just the daily diet of bad economic news, or the gallop of one section of the workforce to put itself inside a safe haven at everyone else’s expense, it’s the freefall caused by conflicting versions of what’s happening and the largely unpersuasive remedies underway. If there was ever a time for an address from a Taoiseach on prime time TV, it is now. I’d really like to see some good authority, passed out from the top with no holding back for fear of frightening the horses. While it is true that Charles Haughey’s ‘we are living way beyond our means’ broadcast is often held up to ridicule now, at least as Taoiseach and leader, he told the nation exactly what kind of challenges it faced.  Though obviously talented, hardworking and combative, Brian Lenihan is not Taoiseach. However, it would seem that as Minister for Finance he’s a man alone in charge of the recession brief.

Up until recently I’ve been telling myself that I can do recession based mostly on the fact that I weathered recession before. However, last time I had no responsibilities, no huge bills, and no children. My understanding of the last recession is really no use now. Even considering the mini-prosperity of the Lemass era, it’s still true to say that up until the 90s, Ireland was just plain backward and underdeveloped, a recession here or there didn’t matter all that much in light of the fact that the generality of people didn’t have much. My grandparent’s generation emigrated, my parent’s generation emigrated, my generation emigrated – that’s the history. But somehow during my lifetime I came to view Ireland as having become a proper country, no longer a banana republic. I thought being born Irish was a better birthright for my children than it had been for all the dead generations that went before. Now I see that the American wake is engraved in my own future and that of my children as surely as if boom never happened. There’ll be airport goodbyes and phone calls from America or Canada or England or Australia – a grandchild announced by photo attachment on an email.

You’ll think, no doubt, that I’m a shockin’ Irish mammy; the kind who wants all her children living ‘up the road’ and is already imagining her grandchildren -  I’ll own up to it, I am! I think family is important. I read somewhere and unfortunately I can’t remember where, that young families are most stressed where there is no day-to-day contact with wider family: aunts, uncles, grandparents. Our ancient forbearers hadn’t much going for them but human society was once modeled around family and community. Yes, nobody went anywhere, you were born and grew up in a town or a village or a townland and that’s where you lived out your days but on the other hand, you got to see that the elders did have wisdom and that grannies and aunts were great childcare manuals and babysitters. This is the golden mean; how it should be. I would like to be there for my children, even when they’re adults, because my own parents have shown me how good and right and mutually-enriching this is.

A friend who’s just returned home after spending 6 months in California made a comment recently something along the lines of ‘well the pubs are still full and everybody’s still laughing their heads off’. What she meant was that to her fresh eyes, things weren’t as bad as she’d been led to believe. It got me thinking, jocosely at first, that it was laughing our heads off got us into this in the first place. Then I began to wonder if in fact there is a fundamental irresponsibility in us that was prepared to laugh while Rome burned? I’ve come to think of it as a sort of Dachau-syndrome: we all ignored the smoke rising off the white heat of the economy just as the citizens of Dachau once refused to put two and two together about the crematoria.

This is why the current blame game is so pointless. Yes, we have every right to be angry but we should be just as angry at ourselves as we are at government. It would seem that until this impasse, this national state of denial is fully debunked, we’ll never move on to fixing ourselves or to pulling together to dig Ireland out of this monumental hole.

There’s comedy to be made of the current we’re all fucked and we’re all gonna die sensibility but just because it’s easy to laugh at fearfulness doesn’t mean the purveyors of doom are wrong. It makes me think about studying history and all the times I’d wondered how or why people didn’t see themselves speeding headlong into wars or famines or dictatorships. That’s the thing; it’s hard to make sense of the moment when you’re living in it. This is how zealots with crazy ideas but certitude get ahead in times like these. The real comedy is though, that even a crazy zealot would shudder at the thoughts of steering Ireland now. There are no visionaries in Fianna Fail, the Green Party or any other political party, crazy or otherwise. So it’s just us and them and we’ve got to figure it out together.

I’d be less jittery if I could see big incentives for job creation. I’d also like to see a renewed emphasis on quality in education; if we must return to the live export of young people let them leave from an educational system that is rigorous and world-beating. Most of all though I’d like to see the argument between the public sector and government settled – militancy now looks like a pampered privilege for the ludicrously cossetted and it’s a logjam to any forward progression. We all have to take the pain and from the viewpoint of the unemployed, some job, any job, is wealth indeed. Beyond ideas like Your Country Your Call, I’d like to see some genuinely philanthropic skill-sharing organisation get underway, one where people like me, hopelessly unemployed, could pass on some of their hard-won wisdom and skills to a new generation. I’d do it for free, just to get out of the house, just to feel that I don’t have to endure this era passively, just to get Chicken Licken off my windowsill and back to fairyland.

Menacing Chicken photograph courtesy of Matthias Selderhuis @ Flickr here

I’ve said that one of the purposes of this blog is to examine what it is like to live now. Amongst the most complained-about aspects of modernity is time poverty. We live in an age of time-consuming information overload: we are permaconnected to the web, social networks and mobile phones. Recently, as earthquake hit Mexicali, Twitter lit up with live on-the-spot commentary and photographs. All this information makes constant demands on our time and concentration. It contributes to the internal noise in our heads and I often think, that for all the absorbing magnetism of the digital age we’re still stuck with that old human conundrum of being neither able to see in deep or out far. That in being permaconnected, we’re more disconnected than ever from our interior selves: the public, hastily communicated versions of ourselves transmitted on Twitter or Facebook or in texts is at once true and frustratingly reductionist and it makes us think in something akin to soundbites.

What time poverty means for me is the lack of time available for introspection although not of the navel-gazing kind. You know the lines from Wordsworth’s Daffodils “For oft, when on my couch I lie,/ In vacant or in pensive mood,/ They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude”. I believe that for optimum mental health, to be at one with yourself, you need to have the time to access vacant and pensive moods. It almost goes without saying that attempting to understand the ‘self’ (that inward eye/I) is vital in attempting to understand the ‘other’ and the world at large.

I have always loved to write and to me it has forever been a much more satisfying way of communicating than talk. Particularly when confronted with difficulty, I have found that putting my argument in writing reflects better what I want to say than all my verbal wooliness in speech. Equally, in years of writing TV or radio scripts or reviewing books, it was only in committing thought to paper that I could satisfactorily establish what trope I wanted to follow: to find out what I think I have to write it down.

In 2001 I interviewed the Scots novelist and short story writer A.L.Kennedy and in describing the process of writing she said “There’s this whole concept of the writer being in control but it’s a daily process of picking up stuff that you’re given by chance or that you’re looking for because you’re in a state of mind that makes it more visible. But after a while you’re aware that you’re sort of surfing and that most of what you’re surfing on you’re not providing. You just have to keep your balance.” This image of the writer surfing on subconscious thought has stayed with me ever since and seems to me to be at the centre of human creativity whether in words or art or music.

It’s a curious serendipity then that a couple of weeks ago I picked up a book The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves by American author, Siri Hustvedt whose novels I’ve devoured avidly ever since I read What I Loved some years back. In this non-fiction work Hustvedt sets out to examine the sudden arrival of an all-over body tremble which strikes her most often in addressing conferences or making speeches. The perplexing aspect of this outbreak of shaking is that it bears no relation to performance anxiety or any neurological lesions visible on fMRI. The mysterious arrival of what seems like an unknowable subconscious self sets Hustvedt on a journey to examine the relationship between brain and mind, psychiatry and neuroscience, emotion and rationality.

These days, what used to be called hysteria is categorised as a conversion disorder and it’s still something that’s mostly identified in women. At its simplest, a conversion disorder of this type is characterised by physical symptoms that may be traced back to an earlier emotional stressor. Thus, Hustvedt wonders if her periodic shakes are related to the death of her beloved father two years previously. She asks, “Was I thrown into a subliminal realisation that his absence was permanent, irrevocable, without being aware of the turn taken inside me?”

Hysteria, the notion of it, has a horribly debased currency. No woman wants to be labeled as hysterical nowadays, it conjures up images of Bronte’s madwoman in the attic, a harridan bent on deranged havoc or poor Alice James, as bright as her brothers Henry and William, but a lady invalid and bath chair inhabitant all her adult life. Hustvedt begins to wonder though, if hysteria ought to be rehabilitated and re-examined. Perceptively, in looking at the history of hysterical disorders, she sees that traumatised soldiers could not be accused of being hysterical like a gaggle of girls. No, for men, the disorder would come to have the much more respectable, less loony title of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Siri Hustvedt

It’s difficult territory even for a writer as elegant as Hustvedt: navigating the abstruse jargon of psychiatry (which perforce one must use) is one thing but writing about mind is also a difficult job of translation even into one’s own native language. It’s difficult because, in the course of a self-examination as opposed to an objective overview alone, one confronts the idea that writing is mind and that it’s slippery and mercurial. This fact isn’t lost on Hustvedt and the most absorbing theme of this book is her examination of how, for her as a writer, memory and imagination combined in the act of writing trigger mind in a way speech never can. It’s like the concept of automatic writing (an idea debased by its relationship with supernatural hocus pocus) where you do not know exactly what aspect of mind you’re channeling until you write it down and it relates directly to that quote from my A.L.Kennedy interview almost a decade ago and to my own experience of writing.

In beginning to wonder if her shaking is psychosomatic at a level well below primary consciousness, Hustvedt makes the discovery that in some cases people with a conversion disorder may present with many of the same physical symptoms as those who have suffered brain injury or organic brain disease. In other words, the subconscious mind can make the brain mimic symptoms of brain injury. My understanding, slim as it is, of this area stems from my own faltering and failed relationship with 1st year Physiological Psychology at university and a later reading of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by neurologist Oliver Sacks. In that book Sacks presented case histories of patients most of whom had an underlying brain injury or organic condition which manifested outwardly as aphasia(the loss of the ability to speak or understand speech) or agnosia (the inability to recognise objects visually or by use of the other senses) to name but two.

In Hustvedt’s researches she comes across case histories like that of Justine Etchevery who, over a century ago, witnessed the deaths from disease of many of her siblings, then suffered assault and attempted rape and later was badly burnt when she fell into a fire during her first convulsive attack. When Justine arrived in hospital she was suffering from a lack of sensitivity on her left side which was followed by the paralysis of all her limbs. Eight years later, she inexplicably recovered from her paralysis and was able to move and walk again. From an article in Brain in 2001 Hustvedt quotes the experience of an Algerian woman who flees a shooting where family members were murdered only to end up with a partially paralysed left arm after a later more ordinary upheaval in her everyday life. Neither of these women had any organic reason for their symptoms nor were they putting it on or looking for attention or any of the other accusations leveled at those whose social compliance is in question.

For all the complex theory the whole idea is really quite a simple one, and even the ancients knew it – the truth will out! No matter how we suppress or process the experience of stress and trauma, it finds a way round the dam. To encounter this in one’s own life, is to meet an alternative you; a frightening, undisciplined self who takes over unbidden by any conscious thought. Sometimes the surfacing of the alternative self, the sudden sneaking perception of duality is so unacceptable that many who experience it greet it with ‘la belle indifférence’ refusing to acknowledge it either publicly or privately. It’s almost like the internal narrator, the creator of internal monologue finds the instinctive, mammalian core self repellently and embarrassingly simple-minded.

If you’re interested in how humans think particularly when that thinking relates to writing, Siri Hustvedt’s The Shaking Woman is a must-read. It persuaded me out of a default overly-scientific view of mind as a processor or an internal computer, something knowable, predictable and mechanistic. I thought again of all the many times I’ve covered mental health issues as a producer in television and radio and my recognition then that mental illness is only a baby step away from so-called normal functioning and therefore unfairly maligned by being socially stygmatised (especially here in Ireland). The crowning delight though is to be reminded again how very mysterious we are to ourselves, how relatively uncharted (and possibly unchartable) the human mind is, how mystic is the relation between mind and self and creativity. I’m glad I made the time to read this book and then to be vacant and pensive retreating, as Hustvedt puts it, “to the place where we hide without being seen by others, the refuge we seek when we’re afraid and the dark sanctum that makes lies possible, but also daydreams and reveries and bad thoughts and intense internal dialogues”.

The Shaking Woman or A History Of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre) £12.99/€16.90

Since writing this post I’ve come across an interestingly sceptical view of neuro-realism by Ben Goldacre.

One of the phrases I most like from Hiberno-English is “he had a great welcome for himself”. You say it about a prideful and self-satisfied person; someone who graces you with his, or indeed her, presence. Someone who thinks they rock your world. By the sound of it, this phrase comes from Irish originally and for me there’s something deeply resonant about it.

When I was a child, I had a great welcome for myself. I think it came from being well-loved. I expected the world to smile on me and largely, it did. In the first house I lived in, I made myself welcome in the home of the childless couple next door. I ate a goodly amount of their currants and had to be dug out of their kitchen at bedtime. Later, when we moved to live on a farm, the family next door had 10 children and their house was reached by an exciting journey that involved a ladder down a drainage ditch, a plank across the drain and a short but pleasant walk through their home meadow. When my mother realised that I was welcoming myself to mealtimes and to all the rights of the 10 children of that house, she put a stop to my gallop. I began to learn the social niceties of visiting at the right time and of not getting under people’s feet; a mysterious process that didn’t come naturally to someone with a great welcome for herself.

It ended up that I was often quite lonely; the children next door had each other and went to a different school and since I wasn’t allowed to torment them day and night with my presence, I spent a lot of time looking at insects, talking to the calves and observing the social habits of hens. I can tell you that there’s only so much time that you can occupy staring at a Hereford calf no matter how luxuriant his eyelashes.

Maybe I’m condensing it into one time period, but back then there was an interval when I was ill twice in succession, I had a gastric bug followed swiftly by measles. The delirium caused by a high temperature made the flowers on my bedroom curtains animate into monsters; it was my first experience of the weird stuff my head could do. I was still bandy-legged and languishing when one evening I heard my father’s car pull up in the yard. Even the dead would arise at such an eventuality; my dad was a reliable bringer-home of treats to the ill – a Supersplit or a Rocketpop, a licorice pipe or a gaudy ring. This evening, whatever he had was in the boot. I still remember leaning on tiptoe to look in the old Austin 1100. There, amongst the bits of baling twine and fertiliser bags, blinking in the light from the yard lamp, were two black and white collie pups – soft and clean and wet-nosed.

The larger pup we kept ourselves, the other went to my mother’s brother who farmed miles away. My uncle called his dog Prince; he would only call a dog Prince or Rover – no extemporising. My father on the other hand had mad ideas and our dog was called Bruce after Bruce Woodcock, the great Doncaster boxer of the 1940s whose photograph, cut from a newspaper, was kept in my father’s scrapbook.

Now I try not to hold with anthropomorphism (attributing human characteristics to an animal) it seems so wishful, but when I was a child, that humble dog meant the world to me. He grew to be sleek and handsome while his brother was unkempt and fidgety and sort of thick. Bruce was also patient to a saintly degree and never snapped. My brother and I rode on his back (which made him sit quite quickly), we dressed him in headscarves and frocks, he was a constant at birthday parties, trips to the lake and boat rides on the Yellow River. His hatred was reserved solely for rats and that only because a rat he cornered once in the block-shed bit him on the nose – I remember the livid red of the blood on that black nose and the surprise that the blood wasn’t deepest black too. Even mention of the word ‘rats’ afterwards would send him into a frenzy of searching and barking and growling.

Bruce and I formed a pack and he let me be lead dog. We tramped the fields and watched the cattle and picked dewy mushrooms together. We lay in the sun and imagined fairies and angels and ghosts nearby. We went out at night together to get buckets of turf or to walk to our neigbour’s house under the yellow glow of a flash lamp. He spanned all my childhood and when we left the farm and happiness behind, he came too.

Bruce and me (a tribute to terrible cameras)

In Dublin then, people had city dogs; they had pugs and terriers and Jack Russells. In the suburbs Bruce was a giant among dogs and he took to city life with great insouciance; he was soon noted to be an expert at using zebra crossings. In the burbs people did foolhardy things that wouldn’t be done on a farm – they left brown bread and roast chickens to cool on their back doorsteps – Bruce filled my mother’s dahlia bed with emergency rations stolen from such sources.

Through all that time Bruce was my staunch friend when humans let me down. City life was terrifyingly otherly to me: the people, how they viewed life, how they saw me – a culchie – all brought unwelcome realisations to a girl with a great welcome for herself. Just as we had tramped the fields, Bruce and I now tramped the burbs, exploring the rows of half-built houses behind ours, spending ages in the park observing the mating rituals of city teenagers (you didn’t get to see the like of that on a farm in the middle of nowhere), and generally operating as a two-for-one deal. Bruce was my invisibility cloak, through him I made the transition to a new life, feeling my timid, tremulous self to be masked by a large and gregarious dog.

Bruce died while I was away working in England in my first real job. He’d had very bad arthritis in his hind legs and, as his appetite diminished, he grew weaker and weaker. On the last morning of his life, my mother brought him a bowl of water and though very far gone, he wagged his tail once more and gave that glad look of his. When next she checked he was gone.

I read the news in a letter that came from home. I was living in digs overlooking a city park, and the summer air was filled with the sound of a steel band practising nearby. My last tangible link with my country childhood was gone, and though I was reared not to be sentimental about animals, that day is clear in my memory yet.

I love city life now. I love that a book or a film or a night out is only a walk or a Dhrinklink away. I love its endless possibilities for friendship and new conversation and the easy mingling of different kinds of friends. But what I miss, even still, all these years later is a dog or a horse or preferably both. But the city is a rotten place for a dog, it’s lonely by day and unnaturally indoorsy by night. There’s the whole obsession with bringing your dog for a walk when what you really mean is bringing it for a shit (anywhere but your back garden; the footpaths of Dublin are testament to this). There’s the constant yapping of lonely dogs in deserted daytime houses and drifts of dog hair on couches and carpets; places it was never meant to be.

For a dog, you cannot beat a country doghood – high meadow and briars to comb off the loose hair, an infinity of shitting sites, the health and liveliness brought by acres to roam and herding to do. There’s no need for baths or combing or any of that primping. To have had a dog in such circumstances is to have experienced the perfect pairing of animal and human; a mutually beneficial and functional relationship. Though I can’t really make myself believe that I’ll never own a dog again, for as long as I can only provide the roaming rights to 25 metres of garden, that’s how it’ll have to be.

Then again, I once knew the king of dogs and I don’t think there’s any replacing that.

Photo of border collie pup courtesy of Chris Brookes Photography on Flickr and here

Arts Lives • 23/03/10 •

It took me 3 years as producer to raise the funding to make a TV documentary about crime novelist John Connolly. At long last, the time has come and it premiered on RTE 1 on March 23rd. Here’s some background information about the documentary. Continue Reading…

Within any organisation or workplace or corporation there are two kinds of truths or realities. On the one hand, there are the ordinary foot-soldiers, the cogs that keep the system turning over, the people who do the day-to-day work. On the other hand, there is management, the officer class, the big picture people who don’t get involved with the nitty gritty but rather set the rules, impose the standards, preserve and grow the organisation or business.

In many organisations for a cog to get promoted to management does not require that person to alone have a perception of how the organisation can be better grown or improved or secured. No, a person headed for the top must be able to make what’s called ‘difficult decisions’ this, it seems, is what separates the men from the boys.

For instance, in recession, a business will look to promote people who can pinch pennies but more importantly who can look across a desk at their erstwhile colleagues and tell them they’re being laid off or having their wages cut or that they must work longer hours for less money. Management accurately perceives that there are not many foot soldiers who would either relish or excel at this task. This is why, in so many instances, people who get to the top of organisations are neither particularly gifted or insightful or hard-working, their chief talent is to be able to unblinkingly do the shit and keep their mouths shut about it too. Those who sign up for this Faustian deal will, in return, get better pay, further promotional opportunities, better job security and an entre into the world of jockeying and ass-guarding that comprises the next stage of upper management.

The world of management is a mystery to the foot soldiers, they see it as through a glass darkly, because management is a world as secretive and suspicious as the freemason’s weird world of nods and winks and handshakes.

I believe that management in the Catholic Church, either in Ireland or in Rome, is built on the same principles as patriarchal management systems elsewhere. Of all the saints of the Catholic church in modern times, how many were bishops or cardinals or Papal Nuncios or Popes? Not many I’d wager because saintliness and do-gooderism is incompatible with higher management. The messy stuff of staying up all night to help a person in trouble or to offer wartime Jews haven in the Vatican City or to share your bread with the famine-stricken; that’s all foot soldier stuff – all that saintliness and genuine goodness and stripping oneself of self-interest (one of the alleged purposes of the vow of celibacy). Continue Reading…

In 1915 the American poet Robert Frost published a collection called ‘North of Boston’ and in it is one of Frost’s finest poems ‘Death of the Hired Man‘. It’s an odd enough poem in that it consists of a dialogue between farmstead couple Mary and Warren about the unexpected return to their home of itinerant labourer Silas. The couple get to discussing their obligation to Silas when his brother, a bank manager, lives 13 miles up the road. Mary says

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in”.

“I should have called it

Something you somehow haven’t to deserve”

It’s a terribly sad poem imbued as it is with the sense of a life wasted; a wavering light extinguished with no one to see it burn to its end. I thought about Frost’s definition of home when I read about the tragic life and death of the Dublin girl whose confidential report refers to her only as T.F. We all know now that her name was Tracey Fay and that her life, from her birth in 1983 to her death in 2002 was a catalogue of pain and dysfunction. Continue Reading…

You can tell a lot from walking down Grafton Street on a Friday night

I think my personal state of hysteria started around the time someone cracked that joke about the difference between Ireland and Iceland. Right about then I started to think about the 80s again and the similar yawning grey tedium ahead of us now. I began to remember damp bedsits in Rathmines – a room with a lifting, dirt-encrusted carpet – a gimcrack bathroom cubicle and a shower blossoming with fungi – the grease round the two-ring cooker and the smell of fries past. The phone in the hall that rang in the night; someone calling from Boston or Munich or London. Gut-rotting home-brew beer and a toasted sandwich split four ways in a basement café on Suffolk Street.

I was only a girl then and didn’t mind it much; we thought the bedsits, the home-brew, the toasted ham and cheese were all great – we had hormones and no responsibilities and that can affect your ability to accurately perceive reality. I’d worked in the U.S. and in England and I hadn’t liked it. They, the Brits, the Americans, just didn’t get me and quite probably I didn’t get them. I couldn’t understand the need to be up with the lark on a Saturday or Sunday, the striving, the jockeying, the boring wittering on and on about work. I didn’t think booming economies were anything to write home about; people were time-poor and distracted; it was sort of joyless and empty.

But those work experiences changed me despite myself. I learned not to scowl at cranky, unreasonable people; I learned to make a pitta roll like my life depended on it. I learned not to mutter when in the presence of bullshit; I learned to play the game. As it turned out that was useful because in the late 80s and early 90s in Ireland you had to be good at sucking it up. For a while I worked very hard for someone whose constant refrain was that the brightest and the best had left the country and I managed not to punch her lights out. Maybe you could characterise my decision to stay as provincial but I don’t think it was; I loved my own place, I loved my own people; I had the language to deconstruct them, and they, me.

RTE corridors: designed for sprinting down with tapes

The years slid by in a mirage of work: working late, working early, working weekends. It started with working to hold onto a job, any job: slack off and there were ten more people who’d slide in. There’s something about recession that brings out the creeps and the bozos, the penny-pinchers and the blood suckers and I worked for a few of those.  Soon I was one of those workaholics that I pitied in England and America. The sine qua non was you were lucky to have a job at all. Later, getting an entry visa for Mediastan was camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle stuff and it was a principality with rules of its own.

The thing about television and radio that’s less evident in the print media is that it’s all show business. Whether it’s news or current affairs or sport or entertainment, it’s all channeled through presentation; a performance. Therefore, the old rule of show business applied everywhere; the show must go on, ‘the play’s the thing wherein to catch the conscience of the king’. The inner workings of the average TV or radio programme were satisfyingly complex too; a hundred detailed and interdependent manoeuvres all leading to one telly half-hour. The film ‘Broadcast News’ got it right, the derring do, the scurrying down corridors with tapes, the churning out of scripts, the programme post-mortems, the brain-storming sessions,the jaw-clenching fear as the countdown began that it would not be alright on the night. All the films that deal with the inner-workings of broadcasting are of course comedies because all the do or die stuff is plainly ridiculous when, as one rather bluff boss of mine put it, ‘you’re only making bubble gum for the brain’. Nevertheless, that’s how it was and is, you become a member of a caste replete with its own secret signs and for those who work behind-the-scenes, it’s hard, relentless, all-encompassing but also fun and endlessly interesting and absorbing.

I can only think that lots of other ordinary Irish people of my generation went through the same ‘hould onto your job’ experience. We earned pretty average wages (I, for one, have never been able to buy a new car) but we got our heads down and went at it like the clappers. We came out of the era of belt-tightening and make-do and we were easily pleased. We lived through the Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition, the Rainbow Coalition, Church scandals, the opening up of Irish society; the stories of graft and corruption, the laying bare of the national hypocrisies, the dawn of openness and transparency. We saw it all, felt it all, it became part of the story of us.

I never believed in the boom. It was all fur coat, no knickers.

Boom, when it came, didn’t feel right to me. Firstly, because I had no experience of it in my own life, it was something that I made programme items about, I tried to tell its story but I didn’t understand it myself. Secondly, I didn’t personally know any people who were making it big, but I saw the houses they bought and I saw them flashing the cash in night clubs and restaurants. It’s easy to say it after the fact, but I never believed in the boom. It was all fur coat, no knickers. It wasn’t based on an electronics industry or a car industry or a food industry or any combination of the latter; it was based instead on that fatal combination in the Irish personality – hubris and greed. Here we were, our time had come. We had our very own Tiger, we were doing that thing we were born for: striding the world stage. We were the feckin best little nation on the face of the planet; we could make a fast buck as good as any Yank and buy up property in Knightsbridge, in Dubai. Boy, were we pleased with ourselves.

What? No more apartments?

I live in a part of Dublin that since the 50s has been a famous flatland. An elderly neighbour remembers when the biggest houses were owned by medical consultants and solicitors who employed white-aproned maids and strict nannies. By the 70s many of these houses were subdivided into flats and bedsits but in the 90s, made attractive by their pre-1963 status, all these houses began to change hands again. The new generation of landlord came in a black jeep, he gutted the old houses in order to subdivide them further and he stuck an extension on at the back for good measure. He was a gimlet-eyed speculator, buying up not just existing stock but vacant lots too; he’d put high density new builds in there. The new landlords may have looked slick and novel in their jeeps but who they were isn’t new, it was the return of the hairy-arsed gombeen – the same fella that collected for the gintry in the 1840s – a type almost as old as Ireland itself and he did what he always did, he bought and sold and rented for profit – no sophisticated business plan there then. He had zero interest in community or patriotism or people or the creation of an equitable society; the ultimate mé féiner. We let him and his party of choice, Fianna Fail, off to the Galway Races and we believed them when they told us it was ‘all good’. I don’t think it really makes much difference whether this builder/landlord type was a one-man show or a huge buccaneering company – the core sensibility was the same old, same old, repackaged and rebranded to shaft anew a forgetful people.

Relative prosperity was just one little blip on the economic flatline of our nation

I was out on Friday night and ran into a bright young man I used to work with, he’s off to Canada in September, his friends are already over there. It saddened me greatly to think that with all the effort my generation made we could not provide a hopeful future for the next. That relative prosperity was just one little blip on the economic flatline of our nation – a blip made of hype and sentiment and as insubstantial as a ghost. That is why I’m feeling a bit hysterical – we sold our birthright for a mess of pottage.

During the last whimpers of the boom I’d be meandering down Grafton Street after a night out; stepping over the bodies, dodging the aggressive drunks and thinking to myself how like Sodom and Gomorrah it really was – a pampered society about to go into a tailspin. On Friday night, on the same walk, I thought I sensed a qualitative difference, now it’s a party on the Titanic, there’s a terrible air of desperation abroad and all conversations turn to it in the end. No one knows what to think or who to believe. We don’t know what NAMA will cost and now we’re bailing out BOI and AIB as well. The fault lines in government are appearing ineluctably, it’s death by a thousand cuts and strikingly familiar to anyone who watched the demise of the Fianna Fail-Labour government of the early 90s. All the grandstanding, all the pieties, all the simulated indignation and prattle and one side no better than the other. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns!

Working up some righteous rage

So yes, I’m feeling hysterical and I’d say I’m not the only one. Everything in the shops is too expensive and the bills are mounting up and, after a full year of unemployment,  I’m afraid I won’t get another job this side of 2013.  I’m sick of listening to all the vested interests (both trade unions and employer’s groups) and trying to adduce the sub-text. I’m sick of watching the Church hierarchy in their ridiculous garb with their Pope who’s too important, too ascetic, to spare one minute of his sacred time to apologise to Irish clerical abuse victims. I’m sick as a parrot that we have a Taoiseach who has not once addressed us, the electorate, on the vitally important issue of the future of this little republic. In fact, I’m not just hysterical, Howard Beale’s speech from the great movie Network comes to mind -

“All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,

‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

‘Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad! Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it:

“I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

(Network 1976)

PS 8.50 am 23-02-10 STOP PRESS! – It seems the Pope told the bishops he was sorry and he told them to tell youse. (in the time honoured way that messages were also passed on in Goldenbridge and Ferrybank and Artane)

Get those robes off and make friends and family really, really proud.

Amongst the ten or so memories I have of early childhood is one where I went to a hurling match with my father. It was a wintry, lowering midlands day; the kind of bitter cold that makes the ref’s whistle slice the air. It isn’t clear in my memory whether my father played in this match or if he just knew someone who did. All I can recall is the drift of men into the dressing room afterward; the skid of studs on concrete, the white mud-spattered shins, the musky smell of sweat; and my dad telling me I couldn’t come in, that I was to wait at the door till he came out. Then, I didn’t know anything about gender differences, all I knew was that there was somewhere I couldn’t go and it was because I was a girl. I could hear my father talking inside the miserable mucky galvanised hut that passed for dressing facilities back then. There were laughs and a bit of language, it was the place to be and I couldn’t go there. I can only think that until then my sense of self was rooted in personhood, I wasn’t fully aware of being a girl or female and this experience was my first encounter with a boundary. I must have made a bit of a fuss about this at home afterwards because my father bought me a sliothar and a hurl and started to teach me how to pick up and puck the ball.

You could say, were I a boy and outside my mother’s dressing room, back then, I wouldn’t have been allowed in there either and that’s probably true even though the elaborate contortions of female dressing and undressing were unlikely to expose anything other than an elbow or a shoulder. But for the girlhood me it was just the first of many realisations about things a girl couldn’t do or wasn’t supposed to do. At Mass men and women (in mantillas, hats and headscarves) sat on opposite sides of the church, the boys and the girls playgrounds at school were separate, my father got more respect in shops and in other public places than my mother did. Society saw him as a paterfamilias and my mother and brother and I belonged to him. Neither my father or my mother held with any of this and barring that one entirely understandable dressing room ban, my father supported all my efforts to be as good as a boy without laughing. I traipsed after him to marts and matches and funerals – all gatherings dominated by men and boys and he never seemed to mind being the only man there with a little girl in tow (this was the 60s in rural Ireland and as I write I’m amazed anew at the changes, the past is indeed another country)

What trainee feminist hurlers looked like back then

In any case, there was a set of rules and even to the eyes of a little girl it was clear that the likes of mammies or aunties or grannies didn’t make them. The mammies, aunties and grannies were too busy; they milked cows, made hay, delivered calves at 2am and made sure the motley collection of men, children, dogs, cats and hens were fed. They also managed the farm money and had sidelines in selling eggs and rearing turkeys for the Christmas market. They held the reins of power lightly though; I wonder if they actually even realised that anything of any importance was only achieved by their hands, their minds.

Of course the mammies also passed on to their daughters the understanding of what it was to be female in the world. This involved much instruction on how to be ‘a little lady’ – they were great women for diminutives – by putting ‘little’ into sentences you could make something seem both passive and easily achieved. The lady imperative was laced through with religion too. You were not to sit in an unladylike manner with your knickers showing because your body was ‘the temple of the Holy Spirit’. Cursing was ‘taking the holy name in vain’ as well as unladylike and could make you sound like ‘a British Tommy’ (a nice bit of nationalist post-war bias there). Boys could curse like the proverbial troopers, get filthy and hang by their knees from the top bars of swings without enduring similar exhortations; boys were forces of nature that couldn’t be stopped or changed. They didn’t have to worry about being temples or any of that guff. I wonder if in their secret hearts the mammies even believed the guff because the lady imperative was also socially driven, the mammies knew that one day they’d be sending their daughters off to convent secondary school and they didn’t want any daughter of theirs to come across like an uncouth, female barbarian.

By the time I got to the Brides of Christ change was a comin’. There were only rumours of the days when you had to dress and undress under your dressing gown, and in truth, the nuns didn’t talk all that much about being ladylike; their veils had shrunk and so did the length of girls’ P.E. skirts. Even though I didn’t comprehend it at the time, and generally didn’t ‘like’ the nuns, here was a community of women that didn’t live day-to-day under the rule of men (even though the Church was and is a monument to patriarchy) and this independence influenced how they educated the girls in their charge. The best of the nuns who educated me were fiercely interested in our success in the world and I even recall very many discussions about equality in Religion classes. A generation back, in the dank 50s so often recorded in Irish letters, the same order of nuns would have educated girls to be hostesses and wives, but TV had arrived, Liberation Theology had arrived, the comedy (as we thought) of bra-burning Women’s Lib had arrived, and inexorably all these influences seeped into the way us girls and the nuns thought. If there’s a girly version of being prepared to become captains of industry then that’s what we got (as well as some useless instruction on the Billings Method).

Vic Reeves thinks women are regressing

“Even now women don’t have the power that they had in the 80s”

The point I’m getting to is that I was lucky enough to be educated by both my parents and the nuns to understand myself to be a member of 50% of the human race (not a minority), that my brain was more important than my body and that I had the right to argue for fair play wherever I encountered sexism. I got to thinking about all this again recently during one week of reading the newspaper and watching television. Although a frequent question in my own internal conversation is what the hell ever happened to feminism, I’m never quite sure how this is perceived in the world at large. The spur to write this post came from an unlikely quarter: British comedian Vic Reeves. The Observer Woman magazine (yes, I like clothes and make-up) runs a regular piece across two pages entitled ‘What I know about women’ and ‘What I know about men’ where a well-known man and a well-known woman talk about their sentimental educations. In the course of such a piece Reeves said “I had my first long-term relationship with a girl called Lucy in the 80s. A feminist, she went on Reclaim the Night marches, and as far as our relationship was concerned there was never any doubt over who was in charge. Women who were in their 20s then had it really good – us men were right under the thumb, but we sort of liked that. In the 90s it all seemed to go backwards for women – control drifted away, and slowly it regressed to what it had been like in the 50s and 60s. Even now women don’t have the power that they had in the 80s – back then you wouldn’t dare say anything at all to a woman because you’d get a smack round the chops. Women were at their most powerful then”.

I wonder about the under the thumb thing, did that mean parity or dominance, only Reeves knows, but it makes me ask why, if women’s declining status is apparent to a man, is it not apparent to women? Because that seems to be the case; we women are regressing, retreating back into the kitchen (we still do the lion’s share of housework), thinking again about Prince Charming and watching ‘How to Look Good Naked’ on TV. That television programme in particular makes me squirm on my sofa. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the pitch; you get a woman whose self-esteem is in the cellar of her soul, she’s got a shit wardrobe, shit hair and oftentimes she’s coming out the other end of a shit marriage/relationship. What does such a woman need – more friends, a better job, a few good books, or to get out more? No, she needs to pose semi-naked for a coy photo shoot and then she needs to follow this up with prancing up and down on a runway in her underwear in an overlit shopping centre. The pièce de résistance of ‘How to Look Good Naked’ is at the end of the runway show when the lucky, lucky woman, in another extravagance of coyness, gets her full kit off while being blocked from view by a gaggle of models. The programme tells us over and over that this makes the woman feel like a million dollars, and it makes ‘friends and family’ proud of her. She has stopped being a sad old sack(socially unacceptable), has reclaimed her ‘bangers’ (breasts) and has morphed into a sex object again (socially acceptable).

Please tell me it’s not just me that finds this more than a harmless piece of silly television?  Who can’t be shocked at how beleaguered a woman has to be to volunteer for this cynical romp ? Is it  just me who thinks that sexuality is merely one aspect of the tremendously complicated creature that is the human being, that what lies beneath a person’s clothes is just one part of what makes them exciting? It’s like three waves of feminism never happened, women are back to being service bots, they exist to please, they have no mind.

“Did public feminism ever translate to the private world of the family?”

Back in 70s feminism women labeled each other in a really divisive way using language borrowed from politics – women who were known broadly within the wider culture as ‘dolly birds’ were called collaborators, they slept with the enemy (men), some feminists even posited that separatism/lesbian separatism was the only authentic life for a woman of feminist principles. I hated that language, its us and them-ness – and the coverage these peripheral views got was disproportionate to the numbers of women who actually believed in their worth. I’m convinced that this is partly why women started to dislike calling themselves feminists  – it meant you were an intransigent, humourless, man-hater.

I don’t believe however that the feminists landed us with the sorry state of regression we’re in now, nor for a minute do I believe that my life would be anything but poorer were I not reared in a time when angry women got out there and changed the Western world. For instance, I wouldn’t like to be a woman in Afghanistan or India or Africa, no thank you! I think that the ongoing battle for equality is being lost within the family and both men and women are responsible for this. Where the State can intervene with legislation, some kind of simulacrum of equality is enforceable – equal wages for equal work, what questions can be asked at a job interview, the right to take a case if you’re sexually harassed at work, the right not to be discriminated against if you’re a working mother. Behind closed doors, it’s a different story, and we know about the big headline issues here – domestic violence, marital rape – the laws exist but you have to be strong enough and free enough to access them.

What we think less about is how ordinary, undramatic life is lived, by ordinary, reasonably well-adjusted men and women and their children. Did public feminism ever translate to the private world of the family? If a girl is reared in an environment where her mother is the kind of downtrodden slave so beloved of ‘How To Look Good Naked’ what kind of information does that give her about how to be in the world? If such a girl has a father who comes and goes as a free agent, with no responsibilities at home barring putting out the bins and a contribution to the bills, who does she want to model herself on? The slave? I think it might make her want to put on a skimpy dress and drink like a lad – and she won’t have religion or thoughts of being a lady holding her back. I think such a girl might feel that the only thing society values about being female is looking good and being good in the sack cos the stuff her mother does, eh, who cares

“One thing has to happen; that doing it all lark has to stop”

It’s hardly news to anyone that us eejits who believed in having it all (the career and the family) won for ourselves the booby prize of doing it all. Believe me when I say that this experience is the equivalent of what the typical war film says happens to men. You know the story, you go in one side, a raw recruit, full of hope and optimism. Basic training is a bit tough but, you know, survivable. Then you progress to the Front, having babies, working, cooking, cleaning, project-managing the whole thing, and you begin to limp. Then one day, you come back from one tour of duty too many, and you’re a changed woman, brutalised, uncaring, an automaton. You go to the shops, look at the cereal shelves, and you couldn’t be arsed. You’re deranged enough to think that better clothes, a bit of slap and dusting off your cleavage might be the best way of dealing with the PTSD – you’re only a hair’s breadth away from finding yourself patronised by Gok Wan and galumphing around in front of a camera extolling the joys of your naked self.

One thing has to happen; that doing it all lark has to stop – if 90% of the world believes that housework and child-rearing (as apart from mothering) is menial, believe me, there are no brownie points going for it – not even in the eyes of sons and daughters – not even if you’re the living euphemism called a ‘woman in the home’ or a ‘homemaker’. And, the thing is, it’ll make your brain look bad naked; you’ll have wantonly spent all those woman-hours vacuuming and laundering and cooking and bottom-wiping, hours that you could have spent (had you a functioning life partner to share the load) reading or thinking or playing sports or joining clubs or finding a rewarding interest or a fulfilling job. Your brain will be flaccid and unattractive, it’ll mainly be a checklist of chores and how good your body might look bet into Spanx will be no consolation to you then. No, there’s no need to be a prude, to have all those hang-ups about nakedness and sexual desire, but if like Destry, you want to ride again, getting your clobber off in a shopping centre is not a way of proving your high status or your worth, it is instead the female version of the mid-life crisis; of buying that red sports car. It is just as sad and pathetic and hopeful and useless and the day it broadcasts to the nation is the day you’ll begin to regret it. By then you’ll be back to your internal monologue, Gok Wan will have stopped telling you how great you are (so you can undo a few zips and buttons, so what!), and you’ll be able to read in people’s eyes whether they watched the programme or not. Then it’ll dawn on you that the thing that’s wrong is your life, not your body image . The reason you’re miserable is because you’re downtrodden and not because your bra and knickers don’t match. The reason you look great on camera at the end is that you have an inch of make-up on and not because you’re glowing from making a meaningful life journey. I’m sorry to have to say it, I really am, but given a few days of mulling and contemplation, your brain could have saved you from this.

(I  saw the film The Hurt Locker in the midst of writing this post)

Crumbs from the top table of Fine Gael

When I heard around lunchtime yesterday that George Lee had resigned from Fine Gael and from politics, I wasn’t surprised; George is the self-fulfilling prophesy of Irish politics. When he pulled the plug on his career as Economics Editor with RTE News 9 months ago, the main flavour of the initial coverage of the move was shock at this amazing volte face. Here was a man at the top of his game, genuinely revered in homes all over Ireland for the fearlessness and lack of cant that characterised his analyses, and the thoughts of him going over to ‘the other side’ was, well, gobsmacking. You could hear the incredulity in Sean O’Rourke’s voice during Lee’s maiden interview on RTE radio’s News at 1 and it was aimed as much at George’s lack of notice in quitting his job as at the decision itself. There was an indecent haste to the whole thing that boded ill when one considers the kind of long-range plotting and planning needed to see one through a career in Irish politics. If Lee could enter the game at the drop of a hat, it always seemed likely that he could leave too if the whit took him.

After the initial surprise at Lee’s entry into politics blew over, the media moved on to asking about the whys and the wherefores. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a political candidate grilled more thoroughly as to their motives. I thought at the time that there was a mean undertow to it all – there were snidey suggestions that Lee may have been a Fine Gael sleeper for years and that the impartiality of his coverage of the economy was in question. It was clear that he’d picked up a few enemies in Mediastan but beyond that, he was the one thing a cynical and hard-bitten media find it hard to understand: a man of principle. They no speaky that language, it’s like a confrontation with a Martian – they didn’t know where to begin with Lee. I don’t want to be overly hard on the media either though, the skepticism is also something hardwired in the Irish soul – putting your head above the parapet here in the septic isle often gets you labelled as a fool.

But the people of the Dublin South constituency didn’t think Lee was a fool. 27,000 of them voted for him and if Liveline at the time was anything to go by, voters all over the country wished they could vote for him too. With all the heat and excitement, no one much was thinking about what George Lee could do in the context of Fine Gael, what difference could he make in a party where the top positions were already taken by career politicians and most importantly, how could such a party get elected with a singularly unprepossessing leader like Enda Kenny?

That’s the thing I never got about George Lee’s short-lived political career: why Fine Gael? With his Dublin lower middle class background and his man-of-the-people credentials earned on RTE News, why the party of the strong farmer and the solidly middle class professional? Was it only because they happened to ask Lee at a time when he was mulling over a transition from talking about the economy to being an architect of same? The thoughts of him having some influence in Fine Gael though did give people heart and many were thinking of the kind of dream team that could be assembled post-Kenny. Ironically, the combination of Lee, Bruton and Reilly as minds within the FG fold could make the party seem exciting enough to tempt the voters and could have pushed even Enda Kenny over the line. Now, that’s not to be and Fine Gael is the poorer for it.

One of the conclusions one can draw though is that authenticity still matters in politics. Celebrity candidates and parachute candidates have difficulties putting down roots within both constituencies and political parties. The tedium of the constituency clinic, the years spent digging at the dungheap of Irish politics, don’t hold many attractions for someone who wants to shape policy (as opposed to just saving the local hospital or whatever). It’s arguable that for Lee to have the kind of influence he wants he would have been better off entering the netherworld of the special-advisor-cum-kitchen-cabinet-member. There, you get the ear of the leadership across the whole platform of issues without jealous siblings pushing you out of the way. You also get a chance to learn how things work and who’s who. If and when you then get your party elected, and if you really, really have a deep desire to toil at the dungheap then that’s the time to think about standing in a by-election.

Now George is confronting the meaning of nowhere. A political career nixed and while a job still awaits him in RTE (wisely, he only took leave of absence), will he still be allowed work in economic news, even in the background? Though I wouldn’t consider myself a friend of his, I know him and have worked with him. I have a lot of time and respect for George Lee and can only hope that he finds a way to get his dispassionate, clear-eyed economic views back into the Irish public conversation before too long.

The battery hen experience for humans

Back in the day, long, long ago before multi-nationals took over the world there used to be a business concept known as ‘looking after the customer’. It involved the simple acknowledgement of a baseline quid pro quo – you need my service/goods, I need your money. Shopkeepers would even run you a line of credit, also known as tick, in order to keep you coming back for a side of hairy bacon (yuck). They would also exchange pleasantries with you for free and they were prepared to order in something for you even though you were the only person for miles who would eat sardines in tomato sauce (yuck again).

People developed strong brand loyalties based on their first purchase of some household indispensable if the salesperson handled it right. This was how my father came to believe that Odearest was the Valhalla of beds, that Ford cars were suspect and that Bush TVs offered a superior viewing experience. Maybe it only seemed so, but back then your shopkeeper, car dealer, pharmacist, draper, meter reader might actually behave as if they valued your company and your custom. You could feel that you were more than a walking monetary unit to be shaken down and dispatched within a certain pre-ordained time limit.

And if you happened to be displeased with a purchase, you could write a letter of complaint. This was a deadly serious, formal way of you, the customer, showing you meant business. You got out your pen and your blue Belvedere Bond notepaper and wrote “I would like to complain in the strongest terms” (I seem to remember that you could learn in Civics or Business class to write a letter of complaint). In the course of this letter you would demand satisfaction (like in the old days of the duel), enumerate the many ways in which the dud purchase had inconvenienced you, your family, your neighbours and your budgie and demand reparation by means of replacement, credit note or refund. If you were feeling especially indignant you would also demand a goodwill gesture – a replacement radio and complimentary batteries. Then you sat back and waited.

The stories are legion about what could happen in response to a good letter of complaint. For instance, you could get summoned to a department store, meet the MD, get a profuse apology, a replacement product, and a free cream tea. Sometimes, a replacement item needed to be shipped in from abroad and a flurry of letters would ensue so as you got to know Nora, the MD’s secretary on first name terms and when eventually 6 weeks later, you turned up to collect the replacement, the whole office would be delighted to see you and you’d be delighted too. You could brag to your neighbours about insisting on and getting your rights, and a free soft toy as well.

Yes, they were simpler times and, though you might not think it, I’m suspicious of looking backwards in a misty eyed way. It was the 70s, we were pretty hard up and living through one of the worst fashion periods in history. We looked grey-faced and knobbly-kneed and our haircuts said recession. But, by and large, when we complained after shelling out our hard-earned, we got listened to.

Nowadays even the thought of having to interact with the thing called Customer Care, sets my teeth on edge. I’m cross before I even pick up the phone. I’m cross because I have a complaint and I’m cross about the fact that No.1. on every customer care menu asks you would you like to pay a bill (that would be Company Care, no?). The thing about Customer Care, wherever it’s given that name, is that it’s there to frustrate you, piss you off and make you and your complaint go away. It will do this by means of an info@ address or by means of a very nice young man called Colin. Colin will greet you quite perkily and ask you for your name, account number, postal address and the answer to your secret security question. Only after this will he ask how he can help you. Once Colin hears your complaint, he will instantly adopt the stance of never having heard of such an issue arising from the product’s use before. He will take your contact details and promise that the problem will be “looked into” and you know that’s going to be the end of it because Colin is only a slightly more human form of the automated menu. If you press your case with the likes of Colin, say ask for something extreme like your money to be refunded to your credit card (in the case of inaccurate billing), you’ll be told that it’s not company policy to issue refunds in this way, then he’ll give you an address for the company HQ in an industrial estate somewhere and no contact name and recommend you write there.

The thing about the Customer Care experience is that it goes on and on and on. Phone calls, letters, emails, and every time you interact with the company, it’s groundhog day. You’re confronting another blandly amiable customer care operative, and must tell them your whole story, right from the beginning, all over again. It almost reduces me to screeching, incoherent rage – if you can remotely access my computer and move files around as I watch, why, why can you not use my Case Number and update it after the call is over, so as when I phone tomorrow with the same problem still unsolved, you will understand why I’m rather upset?

But customer care quality isn’t the fault of the people who work those phones and PCs. I’ve worked in such a setting and it is the equivalent of being a human battery hen. The reason Colin sounds bland and politely unhelpful is because that’s what he’s been told to do and he’s regularly monitored by a supervisor to ensure he’s not being quantifiably nicer than that. He sits in a gigantic warehouse call centre at a beige desk with a beige chair, under flourescent light that makes everyone look ill, and his nearest colleague’s mouse mat abuts his elbow. There are monitors attached to the ceiling letting employees know who has taken the most calls that day – there are bonuses going for this quantity over quality approach – and toilet and meal breaks are rigorously timed. It’s the sort of place where it’s hard to hold onto your humanity and it’s true that customer care agents grow to hate customers. This though is mostly because the agent and the customer are locked together in this uniquely frustrating, dishonest palaver. It is an abuse of dictionary definition of care and demeans both the customer care agent and the customer.

I continue to be flabbergasted about how companies actually get away with this cynical wheeze. Banks, airlines, computer companies, telephone service providers, mail order companies; some very big players are involved. At the top of these companies sit men and women whose job, once upon a time, would have been to make their company the best goddamn computer/phone/banking company in the world. Now their only job is to grow profits across trans-national borders and to shake down the chumps who wander into their nets. Next time someone tells you it’s not their company’s policy to give you a refund, ask for a supervisor and tell them it’s not your policy to spend money pointlessly or be drawn into a surreal charade of care provision. Keep on repeating varieties of this statement in bland and even tones. Play ‘em at their own game! It’s worth a shot.

One of the things I miss most about working in a buzzy TV or radio production office is the easy, bantering company of colleagues. Colloquially called slagging in Ireland, the quip fest is a shoehorn that eases you into the working day and punctuates the longueurs of the afternoon.

I’ve often thought though that what men say and what women say during these contributions to the gaiety of nations is treated differently. If a male colleague gets you with a particularly apt putdown, the hilarity is general. I’ve been on the receiving end of this and I’ve also dished it with the best and have always enjoyed it hugely. But, but, if a woman lays a bit of similarly witty verbiage on anyone else, it is frequently greeted by male colleagues with various exhibitions of cat behaviour – snarls, air clawing, meows.

The reason I got to mulling over all this is that 7 days after Celebrity Big Brother 2010 closed its doors, I’m still thinking about Vinnie Jones. If you missed CBB or don’t know the said Vinnie Jones, then suffice to add that the ex-footballer-cum-actor is what’s said to be an alpha male or a silverback (cos we’ve all watched so many nature documentaries). Such a man bristles with the kind of power that’s transmitted as a constant hum of hair-trigger aggression. When he says something, people listen. They’re careful not to upset him because he seems peevish and vengeful and they laugh at his jokes on the basis of ‘we all laugh when the boss laughs’.

The alpha male type is not rare but I’d never had the chance to observe one up-close in a socially experimental setting (the original but only sporadically fulfilled idea behind Big Brother). Now, one would need a good deal of courage to make meow sounds at such a man, but Vinnie Jones is the best catty bitch I’ve ever seen. The competitive, game-playing strategies needed to fly below the nomination radar on BB were as natural as breathing to ol’ Vinnie and he was a past master at putting out spin against other contestants which sought to influence the House and the public alike.

Jones himself has said that he brought “locker room banter” into the House but dear God, is this merciless meaness really what happens in the society of men? In male-only company, do you have to put up with genuine insults (not jocose slagging) and artfully pointed questions designed to make you look foolish and slow-footed? Is this how hierarchy is established among higher monkeys and men?

It may be down to the storylining and editing style of BB, but Vinnie Jones looked like he spent long periods lying on his bed silently conniving: he seemed to tick with thought. If I’m reading this correctly it takes a lorra lorra time and effort to be an alpha male. Funny then how the traits of the treacherous bitch are solely attributable to women and gay men.

Yes, I know Big Brother is just a game show, and you’re meant to compete to survive but the beautiful thing about it this year is that one could extrapolate some genuinely useful insights from this humble piece of populist TV. It got me thinking about my own adventures in the corporate world and how rudderless I was when attempting to navigate in an environment where most of the senior positions were held by men. It’s hardly ever mentioned but the locker room world of men is just as mysterious to women as the powder room is to men. People talk about masonic handshakes and old school ties but the secret world of men is much subtler than ties or handshakes and women are very poorly equipped to decipher it (because we’re not male). It seems to me that us women only ‘think’ we’re bitches, that we’re only little league bit-part players in the vast scheme of top-drawer bitchin’, and that when it comes to corporate or office politics, we’re not at the races at all.

Occasionally I review books for the Irish Times newspaper. Here are the two most recent reviews.

From today February 4th 2010 - Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad (Penguin) an e-epistolary relationship which developed between BBC radio producer Bee Rowlatt in London and May Witwit an Iraqi academic in Baghdad is the basis for a book that’s not a bit about Jane Austen but is a lot about living with terror and the intricate architecture of friendship. (full text below)

Absorbing tale of friendship across frontiers

BOOK OF THE DAY: Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad By Bee Rowlatt, May Witwit, Penguin, 371pp £8.99

ONE OF the great privileges of being a journalist is the entrée it gives you into lives completely unlike your own. If you’re doing it right it should change you, broaden you or, at least, make you a wiser person – most particularly if you’re covering stories involving hardship and tragedy.

However, through repeated exposure to tragic situations, the journalistic heart hardens, and it becomes easier to close the door or put down the phone and return to your life of relative ease without a second thought.

And yet, and yet, some stories, some people, just stay with you, become part of you – it’s kismet – a real connection and a knot that refuses to be untied.

In 2005, BBC World Service producer Bee Rowlatt was trawling for Iraqi citizens to interview in the lead-up to the first assembly elections under the new post-Saddam constitution. When her efforts led her to Iraqi academic May Witwit, she must have felt as if she’d fallen across the ideal interviewee, because May had grown up partly in the UK before returning to live in Iraq. This meant an interviewee with fluent English who understood both the situation on the ground in Iraq and the audience to whom the interview would be transmitted. But May turned out to be much more than that, and soon Bee Rowlatt found her life inextricably linked to the Kafkaesque existence of a woman trying to hold on to her sanity as Baghdad erupted all around her.

The poorly titled Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad (it’s only vaguely like Reading Lolita in Tehran ) is the thoroughly absorbing account of the e-epistolary relationship that developed between Rowlatt and Witwit, a woman she’d never met.

While hardly touching at all on May’s academic speciality, English literature, the book is still all about writing – how May describes her life to Bee, how Bee describes her life to May – and one is struck by how much better this is than any transcribed conversation or mediated interview. Driven by her loneliness and need to connect, May’s warm and direct style tells us more about the barbarity of daily life in Baghdad than any emissary from the Green Zone could. “The other day two more professors were killed. More shopkeepers in our area have been slain – and I mean that .”

Through her words, a vivid, often funny, May emerges and she is at once a traditionalist (wishing for Bee to have a son or abiding by some loopy rule set down by her husband) and a rebel who has married outside her own tribe, fallen out with her family, argued in person with Saddam, and is disdainful of the patriarchal Arab world. Of extremists in her area, she writes: “They have banned putting cucumbers near tomatoes. They say there is a sexual implication in these vegetables and it is wrong and sinful.”

Soon May discovers that her name is on a death list and it becomes clear to Bee that she must gather all her resources to help May escape Baghdad, where she is virtually a prisoner in her own home. There are plenty of setbacks along the way, from a spelling error that scuppers a visa to a double-dealing passport fixer, but Bee Rowlatt makes a moral decision that plenty of journalists would have bypassed: to attempt to save one life in the face of being unable to save the many. It was the right thing to do, not out of do-goodism alone but out of that other much-maligned idea – sisterhood.

From November ’09  - an anthology, ‘Are We Related’ edited by Liz Jobey (Granta Books) takes a thought-provoking look at family relationships in fiction and in fact.

The secret life of families

ANTHOLOGY: Are We Related? The New Granta Book of the Family Edited by Liz Jobey Granta Books, 408pp, £20.00

HOW GLORIOUS it is to edit a book of fiction and fact about family. Are We Related? The New Granta Book of the Family edited by Liz Jobey proves that such a task has no frontiers. You might just as well edit a book about everything since all human life is here in this faulty and fissured crucible.

Though I have never been a subscriber to Granta , the quarterly magazine of new writing, my bookshelves sag with the quantity of random issues I’ve acquired over the years. I won’t be shunting them off to the charity shop either, because Granta ’s contract with the reader to provide the best fiction and fact about how we live now has never wavered and is consistently stimulating and engaging.

To say that Are We Related? is a delight to read sounds almost Victorian in its sentiment; it suggests an improving book that will not tarnish the tender mind of some unspecified Victorian young person – it also rather undermines some of the harsh, uncomfortable truths between these covers. Yet it is a delight to again meet McGahern, still alive in writing about the people of the lakeshore (I had been too sad about his absence to re-read him) or to meet again the Anne Enright story Little Sister which I first read in Granta’s Brief Encounters in 2001. The fact that I remembered the story a thousand stories later speaks of its quality.

To my shame I hadn’t got around to reading Diana Athill, despite holding a huge mental cache of newspaper-acquired information about her – here, her autobiographical fiction Alive, Alive-Oh about a middle-aged woman who suddenly finds herself pregnant by her married lover, is a poignant examination of subconscious wish-fulfillment as the protagonist’s body buds with the arrival of the April blossoms.

In her introduction to the collection, Liz Jobey refers to Granta ’s first volume on family, They Fuck You Up (also on my shelves), which took its title from the immortal Larkin poem. Here Jobey puts more emphasis on its closing verse:

Man hands on misery to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf./ Get out as early as you can,/ And don’t have any kids yourself.

And there certainly are depictions of family in Are We Related? where kids are begotten and casually tormented or distorted. Jeremy Seabrook writes about his monstrous mother who cleaved such a chasm between him and his twin brother that separation has been the keynote of his life.

Edmund White’s forgiving portrait of his lonely, drunken mother Lila Mae does not stop the reader being appalled at a woman who asks her son to squeeze out her blackheads or to pull fast her stays over juddering flesh all the while ignoring that “her black bush was visible just below the bottom of her girdle”. McGahern’s Guard Harkin in Love of the World is one of his chilly patriarchs, a white-headed boy gone bad who has peculiar resonance in an Ireland still seemingly inured to so-called crimes of passion.

But if there is dark there is also light and warmth. Scottish writer AL Kennedy writes about her amateur-boxer grandfather Joseph Henry Price in A Blow to the Head and captures exactly what it is like to have been the apple of someone’s eye – the much-loved and admired granddaughter of a man who possessed those old-fashioned manly virtues of great strength of will and endurance cut through with kindliness and benevolence.

Equally, Jayne Anne Phillips’ short story Mothercare depicts the troika of Kate, a bewildered new mother, her baby son, and Kate’s mother enclosed in a snow-blanketed house – the endless grimness of early motherhood is leavened by the anchor of the older woman’s presence; her surety makes everything normal and whole and possible even though her own mortality is in view.

In the closing paragraph of Twins Jeremy Seabrook writes “George Eliot once wrote of Nature as ‘a great tragic dramatist’ that unites people by flesh and bone and then divides them by temperament and character” and it seems to me that this is a summation of all that you will find between the engrossing covers of Are We Related?

If you were to buy one last hardback before December’s Budget (or, let’s face it, ever) this might be the one to choose.